changeling chronicles 03 - faerie realm (2 page)

A sharp noise at my heels made me spin around with another diagonal swipe. Red-blue blood spurted out of the tree root, and a shrill scream came from the Lady of the Tree.

“Quit attacking us and we’ll stop fighting back,” I said, though Vance didn’t show any signs of stopping. His blade appeared and reappeared, leaving a trail of blue-tinted faerie blood wherever it struck.

“Get out,” snarled the Lady. “Get out or I’ll change my mind about killing you.”

A root latched around my ankle like a whipcord, hoisting me up into the air.
Oh, no. Not again.
I swiped and slashed, freeing myself and flipping to land on my feet. Vance, meanwhile, was surrounded by stabbing roots like giant earthworms.

“Hey!” I ran at them, brandishing my sword.

A crooning laugh echoed from behind. Anger sparked, and I whipped one of Isabel’s explosive spells from my pocket and hurled it at the Lady’s face.

Unsurprisingly, the spell dissolved before it made contact with the trunk. Should have figured she had a defence line. A shimmering green barrier appeared, confirming my theory. Her Summer magic might not entirely be back, but she had enough of it left to ruin my day.

The tree roots, meanwhile, continued to circle Vance, slicing and stabbing. The Mage Lord moved quicker, cutting off any attempts to grab him, but with trees surrounding us on all sides, we’d have to get past the web of fast-moving roots to escape.

A tugging sensation lurched through my body, pulling me towards the oak tree.

“Shit,” I said. “Vance. Stop the attack. She’s using the vow.”

A faerie’s word was binding. All she had to do was twist the words slightly and I’d be her slave forever. I wouldn’t put it past the evil old hag.

For a heartbeat, I fought against the bindings, then Vance stopped, sword held defensively between himself and the tree roots.

My feet stopped moving forward. I glared at the Lady of the Tree. “You’ll get your promise, but if you hurt either of us, you’ll regret it. If you kill me, you’ll have to face a pissed-off ghost. I know how much you faeries hate remembering your mortality.”

A deafening shriek rang through the forest as the Lady threw back her head and roared with anger. I raised my hands, my own magic reacting to defend me, but Vance’s hand closed around my arm, and the world disappeared in a whirl of motion.

I staggered away from Vance, leaning against a fence. We’d landed on a road, not one I recognised at first.

“Damn,” I said, shaking bits of soil off my clothes. “That was a close call.”

Vance’s mouth was a tight line, and black scales covered his wrists and hands.

“Vance?”

He shook his head. Gradually, the claws replacing his hands began to recede, until the sharp scales disappeared into skin.

“Does that hurt? The scales?”

“No.”

I raised an eyebrow at the slightly dismissive hint to his tone.

“Not anymore,” he elaborated. “Shifting is… uncomfortable, at first, though no more so than magic is.”

“Magic,” I said. “Yeah. Mine pulled me into
Death,
when I first used it, so I get it. Anyway, I don’t know how to use it to find this… Summer magic thingymajig.”

“Sounds like a talisman,” said Vance. “Is that not what witches call a store of their power?”

“Well, yeah, but talismans are impermanent,” I said. “The magic leaks away if left unattended. A natural source of faerie magic… god knows what chaos it’s causing here in
this
realm.”

Vance’s grey eyes darkened. “Such a source wouldn’t go unnoticed for long, but the type of people who seek it out are no doubt the ones we least want to get their hands on a store of Faerie’s power.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered, thinking of Calder. “Okay. Guess we’ll have to talk to the Chief again.” I looked around at the terraced houses alongside the road. “Where are we?” Judging by the neat lawns and three-storey houses, even the occasional car parked in a driveway, I’d say mage territory.

“Two roads from the manor. This area was nearly evacuated last week.”

Ah.
We stood near the intersection with Acacia Road, and half-blood territory. “What d’you reckon? Will the Chief know?”

“He should,” Vance said tightly. “I would hope the last two weeks have opened his eyes to the serious damage his people can cause in this realm.”

“Yeah. Better hope so.” I re-sheathed my blade, then brushed some stray bits of dirt from my new jeans. The whole outfit was new, actually, down to the leather jacket and boots. Vance had—completely without my permission—replaced all my clothes the other week. I hadn’t begun to consider how I’d repay him for it, though I appreciated how he’d respected my taste rather than forcing me to adopt the style of the mages. I’d look ridiculous in a smart suit, though Vance pulled it off absurdly well.

“I sent people to raid those places the ingredients for the serum were delivered to,” said Vance. “The Chief of the half-faeries made several arrests. Maybe he knows something.”

“He’s Seelie,” I said. “Well, half of one. Maybe he’ll be able to tell where this Summer magic store is, because I’m clueless.”

“Perhaps,” said Vance. “If not, he can no longer prevent me from using magic on his territory. His refusal to accept my help cost many lives. He has blood on his hands, and he knows it.”

“Damn.” What with spending the last week in recovery mode, I hadn’t seen the full aftermath of the chaos. “Doesn’t mean he’ll be pleased to see us, though. Last I saw of him, we were both dead.”

Vance’s eyes darkened. “No, you weren’t. And I won’t let that happen again.”

Damn if it didn’t warm me all over to hear the protective undercurrent to his voice. “Don’t worry. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.” I checked my sword and the daggers on the sheaths inside my sleeves were in place. I generally carried two at a time, firmly strapped to me so they wouldn’t get dislodged, say, when a faerie dangled me upside-down.

“Ready?” asked Vance.

“As I’ll ever be.”

Which is to say, not at all. What an absolute mess. If the Lady of the Tree had gone back to Faerie, had others, too? Had someone sneaked into Summer and stolen the tree’s heart, or had the thief been in Faerie itself? I’d always thought the human and faerie worlds were far enough apart that people in this realm, even faeries and half-bloods, were generally unaware of what was happening over the other side of the veil.

Except them. Velkas, and Avakis, and Calder, and whoever else had taken advantage of the thinning veil. Might other Sidhe have come here, like they had during the invasion? Unfortunately, yes. But why the hell would anyone steal a powerful magical object and bring it into the
mortal
world? The Sidhe hated our realm, and their power sources were all but useless this side of the veil.

Unless someone
wanted
the Sidhe to lose their power.

Someone like… a lord of the Grey Vale.

CHAPTER TWO

Even with the dominating presence of the Mage Lord nearby, I checked for hidden traps as we approached half-blood district. High hedges lay in place of fences, while the wooden gate was deceptively strong. Nobody waited outside, but at a small gesture from Vance, the gate slid open.

“How’d you do that?” I squinted at the thick hedges to either side of the gate, but saw no weird mechanisms. No faeries, either, but sometimes they left their gates unguarded. I was fairly sure they had tripwires in place if anyone came here intending harm.

“Minor displacing spell on the lock,” Vance said.

“There’s a lock?”

“If you look closely.”

I grinned. “So that’s how you opened the gate last time. Didn’t know you were into breaking and entering.”

He flashed a smile at me. “Let’s say I had no concept of limits when I was first exploring my powers.”

Wow. I suspected it’d take a while to get used to the idea of being this deep in the Mage Lord’s life, and him being so deep in mine. Not just because Vance was head mage, but the idea of someone knowing and understanding the hell the faeries had put me through, and persisting anyway, was at total odds with everything I’d experienced over the last ten years since my return from Faerie. Vance was also my employer, technically, but I worked freelance and the mages didn’t really function like regular employers. I’d once been a lowly mercenary working for Larsen Crawley. Now, as a reluctant expert in all things faerie, I did the same job for ten times the pay and the added bonus of insurance should something nasty cause me a life-threatening injury.

Speaking of life-threatening… a voice from inside half-faerie territory shouted, “Mage Lord!”

The word rippled through the gathering crowd on the lawns up to a path alongside the buildings at the far end. The territory always looked slightly different each time I came here, because reality tended to warp inexplicably around fey magic. With the thick smell of decaying leaves in the air and the frigid wind as we crossed the threshold, the territory was out of summer and well on the way to winter. Half-faeries—most of whom looked like eerily beautiful human teenagers—watched us enter. Most were dressed casually in regular human clothes, but several amongst them wore the armoured coats of guards.

I rolled my eyes at Vance. “If you wanted to sneak in without being noticed, you missed your chance.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“Sure it wasn’t.” I returned my attention to the crowd clustering around us. My heart dipped when I heard my name twice, three times. They all knew me.

They knew I had faerie magic.

Most, however, looked more curious than afraid—with the exception of the guards, who eyed my blade with tight-lipped expressions. There were no boundaries between Summer and Winter here. Seelie knights favoured leaf-coloured armour like their chief, while the younger crowd wore bright colours. Some also had wings. Unseelie faeries were even more on the inhuman side, with spiked dark-coloured armour, long limbs, and the occasional tail.

Vance strode forward. “We’re here to speak to the Chief about a confidential matter.”

“Chieftain Taive is too busy to speak with mortals,” said a silver-haired guard I vaguely recognised as the guy who’d given me my first introduction to half-blood territory.

“That’s his name, huh,” I said. “Well, the Chief and I have an understanding.” Namely, that he knew had the magic of a Sidhe lord, and I’d sincerely prefer it if he didn’t tell anyone else the details. Having faerie magic was one thing. Killing a Sidhe lord, even an exiled one, was the very crime a faerie could be exiled for in the first place. Some half-faeries would hate me on principle for it, if they didn’t already.

“You’re carrying iron,” said the guard.

“I have reason to expect to defend myself.” I scanned the group. Alain wasn’t amongst them, and her half-troll boyfriend was presumably locked up for murder, if not dead. He was the one who’d set a kelpie on me once.

Angry whispers passed amongst the half-faeries. Vance spoke over them. “As leader of the Mage Lords, I request an audience for Ivy and myself with the Chief.”

Casting furious looks at the hilt of my visible blade, two guards stepped forward. “We will take you to him. If you use iron, we will treat you as we would a criminal and take action.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Vance, a slight breeze accompanying his words. He hadn’t brought his whole Mage Lord badass act here into their territory, but the hint of thunder in the air told me he wasn’t above unleashing his power if anyone attacked us.

Two guards—the silver-haired guy and a fair Summer female with armour made out of overlapping bark-coloured plates—led the way through the winding path alongside a river. Summer had long gone, and dead leaves were all that remained of the once abundant flowers. An occasional piskie flew past, and a group of gnomes ran shrieking at the sight of us.

Vance didn’t speak, and I wasn’t in the mood to start a conversation with the faeries, so we walked in silence until tall blocks of flats loomed over us on both sides. It wasn’t compulsory for half-faeries to live in this territory—and a large number of them had human families—but most flocked around the Chief, because this area mimicked Faerie better than anywhere else in the city.

Ten years ago, when I was sixteen, I’d come out of Faerie to find they’d infiltrated the human world. I’d had zero respect for their attitude—and to be fair, most of them hated humans. But seeing their desperate attempts to win their way back into Faerie, not feeling they entirely belonged in this world, brought a twinge of sympathy I hadn’t anticipated. Not least because Calder had fooled the half-bloods into thinking he’d take them home, then drugged them into killing one another.

My hate for Calder dimmed the sympathy rising inside me. I couldn’t afford to identify too much with people who, for all the human blood in their veins, belonged to a world that was poisonous to mortals. I figured their Chief would be as pleased to see me as I was to see him.

Our path took us out of the warren of flats and into wilder territory. Winged half-faeries flitted behind tree branches, while dryads peered from inside their trunks—I gave those a wide berth, reminded too much of the Lady of the Tree. Thick, woodsy smells crowded the air, almost masking the faint scent of rot. Faerie played havoc on the senses, and made it easy to fall into obvious traps. Not that I expected anyone to attack the Mage Lord, but I kept one hand on my sword’s hilt at all times.

The two guards led the way through a thicket of trees which gave way to a proper forest, the type which existed centuries before humans lived here. Faerie thrived in natural wildernesses, and Summer magic probably made it grow faster, too.

The guards stopped near a clearing. Nestled amongst the trees was a small house. Wait, the Chief lived here? At first I puzzled over the lack of defences, until I saw the shimmer of light across the path. Faerie magic.